[markjia]

I begun extracting all my CDs onto my hard drive, except I'm running out of space...

I save all the songs as wav files (extracted by EAC), and my small 40 gig RAID is quickly filling up. MP3 compression is not really an option because it just sounds so poor. So, I am looking for suggestions on lossless compression algorithms.

Which program produces the smallest files (but still retains 100% of the original data)? If it's reallydemanding on the CPU, is there any other algorithm that produces files that are larger, but not as processor intensive?

 

[elnero]

Monkeys Audio http://www.monkeysaudio.com/ is one that I know is gaining alot of popularity. Sorry, I don't know all that much about it though.

Phil

 

[CaptBubba]

I use and like monkey's audio. It is quick to encode, not very hard on the CPU, and lossless (allthough I haven't checked that). I have 19cds on my HD and it takes up about 6GB, for a total of around 315MB/cd. So about 50% compression over wav.

 

[penvzila]

Mp3 can sound pretty good with the right alt preset in LAME. You might want to chack out ogg vorbis (lossy) for excellent quality. If you absolutely must have lossless, then go for flac or ape. MPC is very high quality as well, though it is a lossy format

 

[qutius]

I like shorten a lot - I've been using that format for over a year now with the trading of live shows.

FLAC is a new codec, which is similar to shorten. I have yet to use it just yet, but I'd like to.

etree.org has a lot of information on both of these formats if you would like to look around.